In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see
Your old friend Godwin, greater none than he;
Though fallen on evil times, yet will he stand,
Among the spirits of our age and land,
Before the dread tribunal of To-come
The foremost, whilst rebuke stands pale and dumb.
You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lustre blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair-
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
You will see Hunt; one of those happy souls
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom
This world would smell like what it is-a tomb;
Who is, what others seem :-his room no doubt
Is still adorned by many a cast from Shout,
With graceful flowers, tastefully placed about;
And coronals of bay from ribbons hung,
And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung,
The gifts of the most learned among some dozens
Of female friends, sisters-in-law, and cousins.
And there is he with his eternal puns,
Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns
Thundering for money at a poet's door;
Alas! it is no use to say, "I'm poor!"
Or oft in graver mood, when he will look
Things wiser than were ever said in book,
Except in Shakspeare's wisest tenderness.
You will see H-, and I cannot express
His virtues, though I know that they are great,
Because he locks, then barricades, the gate
Within which they inhabit;-of his wit,
And wisdom, you'll cry out when you are bit.
He is a pearl within an oyster shell,
One of the richest of the deep. And there
Is English P- with his mountain Fair
Turned into a Flamingo,-that shy bird
That gleams i' the Indian air. Have you not heard
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
His best friends hear no more of him? but you
Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
With the milk-white Snowdonian Antelope
Matched with his camelopard; his fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;
A strain too learned for a shallow age,
Too wise for selfish bigots;-let his page,
Which charms the chosen spirits of the age,
Fold itself up for a serener clime
Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation. Wit and sense,
Virtue and human knowledge-all that might
Make this dull world a business of delight,
Are all combined in Horace Smith.-And these,
With some exceptions, which I need not teaze
Your patience by descanting on, are all
You and I know in London.
My thoughts, and bid you look upon the night:
As water does a sponge, so the moonlight
Fills the void, hollow, universal air.
What see you?-Unpavilioned heaven is fair,
Whether the moon, into her chamber gone,
Leaves midnight to the golden stars, or wan
Climbs with diminished beams the azure steep;
Or whether clouds sail o'er the inverse deep,
Piloted by the many-wandering blast,
And the rare stars rush through them, dim and fast.
All this is beautiful in every land.
But what see you beside? A shabby stand
Of hackney-coaches-a brick house or wall
Fencing some lonely court, white with the scraw
Of our unhappy politics;-or worse
A wretched woman reeling by, whose curse
Mixed with the watchman's, partner of her trade,
You must accept in place of serenade-
Or yellow-haired Pollonia murmuring
To Henry, some unutterable thing.
I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit
Built round dark caverns, even to the root
Of the living stems who feed them; in whose bowers
There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers:
Beyond, the surface of the unsickled corn
Trembles not in the slumbering air, and borne
In circles quaint, and ever-changing dance,
Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance
Pale in the open moonshine; but each one
Under the dark trees seems a little sun,
A meteor tamed; a fixed star gone astray
From the silver regions of the Milky-way.
Afar the Contadino's song is heard,
Rude, but made sweet by distance ;-and a bird
Which cannot be a nightingale, and yet
I know none else that sings so sweet as it
At this late hour;-and then all is still:-
Now Italy or London, which you will!
Next winter you must pass with me; I'll have
My house by that time turned into a grave
Of dead despondence and low-thoughted care,
And all the dreams which our tormentors are.
O that Hunt and
were there,
With everything belonging to them fair!-
We will have books; Spanish, Italian, Greek,
And ask one week to make another week
As like his father, as I'm unlike mine.
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies, and mince-pies,
And other such lady-like luxuries,—
Feasting on which we will philosophise.
And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood,
To thaw the six weeks' winter in our blood.
And then we'll talk ;-what shall we talk about?
Oh! there are themes enough for many a bout
Of thought-entangled descant; as to nerves-
With cones and parallelograms and curves
I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare
To bother me,-when you are with me there.
And they shall never more sip laudanum
From Helicon or Himeros ;*-well, come,
And in spite of *** and of the devil,
We'll make our friendly philosophic revel
Outlast the leafless time;-till buds and flowers
Warn the obscure inevitable hours
Sweet meeting by sad parting to renew :-
"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
(ON HER OBJECTING TO THE FOLLOWING POEM, UPON THE SCORE OF ITS CONTAINING NO HUMAN INTEREST.)
How, my dear Mary, are you critic-bitten,
(For vipers kill, though dead,) by some review, That you condemn these verses I have written, Because they tell no story, false or true!
Iutex, from which the river Himera was named, is, with some alight shade of difference, a synonyme of Love.
What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten,
May it not leap and play as grown cats do,
Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time,
Content thee with a visionary rhyme.
What hand would crush the silken-winged fly,
The youngest of inconstant April's minions,
Because it cannot climb the purest sky,
Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions?
Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die,
When day shall hide within her twilight pinions,
The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile,
Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile.
To thy fair feet a winged Vision came,
Whose date should have been longer than a day, And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame, And in thy sight its fading plumes display; The watery bow burned in the evening flame, But the shower fell, the swift Sun went his wayAnd that is dead.-O, let me not believe
That any thing of mine is fit to live!
Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years
Considering and re-touching Peter Bell;
Watering his laurels with the killing tears
Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to hell
Might pierce, and their wide branches blot their spheres
Of heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well
May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil
The over-busy gardener's blundering toil.
My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature
As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise
Clothes for our grandsons-but she matches Peter,
Though he took nineteen years, and she three days
In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre
She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays,
Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress
Like King Lear's "looped and windowed raggedness."
If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow,
Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate
Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow :
A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at;
In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello,
If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate
Can shrive you of that sin,-if sin there be
In love, when it becomes idolatry.
BEFORE those cruel twins, whom at one birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time,
Error and Truth, had hunted from the earth
All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learned rhyme,
A lady-witch there lived on Atlas' mountain
Within a cavern by a secret fountain.
Her mother was one of the Atlantides:
The all-beholding Sun had ne'er beholden In his wide voyage o'er continents and seas So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden
In the warm shadow of her loveliness;
He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden The chamber of grey rock in which she layShe, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.
"Tis said, she was first changed into a vapour,
And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,
Like splendour-winged moths about a taper,
Round the red west when the sun dies in it:
And then into a meteor, such as caper
On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit; Then, into one of those mysterious stars
Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars
Ten times the Mother of the Months had bent
Her bow beside the folding-star, and bidden
With that bright sign the billows to indent
The sea-deserted sand: like children chidden, At her command they ever came and went :Since in that cave a dewy splendour hidden, Took shape and motion: with the living form Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm.
A lovely lady garmented in light
From her own beauty-deep her eyes, as are Two openings of unfathomable night
Seen through a tempest's cloven roof;-her hair Dark-the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight, Picturing her form;-her soft smiles shone afar, And her low voice was heard like love, and drew All living things towards this wonder new.
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